The Future Requires a Usable Past

And nostalgia is not the right way to find one

Two of my favorite pundits working today, Matthew Yglesias and Ross Douthat, decided last week to tackle a particular bugaboo of mine: nostalgia. Yglesias argues that the right’s program is increasingly just nostalgia, and that nostalgia is foolish because it is ultimately just a longing for a time when we ourselves were young. Things weren’t really better overall in the past—there’s been real, measurable progress on all sorts of dimensions—and even where there are aspects of the past to remember fondly, nostalgia is a way of forgetting all the other things about the past that we wouldn’t want to go back to at all. Douthat substantially agrees, but argues that, in fact, there are some things that were better in the past, and it behooves us not to forget them. We had them before, so by definition they are possible, so why not try to get them back?

I think these two are, to some degree, talking past each other, when on a deeper level they agree more than they disagree. I think nostalgia is deeply pernicious. But I think a connection with history—not just an understanding of history that might help us understand the present better, but a communion with it that makes it feel a part of us and us a part of it—is deeply important to a healthy society, and even to many people’s individual emotional health. The thing is, I think one way that nostalgia is destructive is that far from building that communion, it poisons it. What’s needed is not nostalgia, but a usable past.

Let’s start with a definition: nostalgia is “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” Nostalgia is, definitionally, a melancholic feeling steeped in futility because it is a longing for the literally impossible. That should be reason enough to suspect it both as a personal orientation and as the basis for a political program. The world only spins forward; the past happened, and you cannot undo it, however much you might wish. Which means that anything you build now must build on the past, even the parts of the past you wish hadn’t happened, and wishing that were not so, wishing that it was ever possible to RETVRN, is simply a refusal to live in the real world, or, often enough, a refusal to live at all.

But it’s worse than that. A nostalgic refusal to accept that the past is past sometimes means literally refusing to end wars that can never be won and should long since have been put to rest. To pick the most obvious domestic example of the negative impact of nostalgia, think of how much damage has been done, not only to the interests and welfare of Black Americans but to the entire country, by American nostalgia for the antebellum South and romanticism of the Lost Cause. But nostalgia can be just as damaging when pressed into service to more respectable causes. Consider, as an example, the continually proliferating references to Munich on the one hand and the Marshall Plan on the other in American foreign policy discourse. Is that a sign of learning from the past? Quite the opposite. Nostalgia is a great way to flatten the past into fables, the better to similarly flatten the present, a way of learning nothing—indeed, of believing that one doesn’t have to learn anything.

I disagree with both Yglesias and Douthat that nostalgia as a political or social matter has much of anything to do with our personal memories of the past, because the most potent nostalgia is for a past that we never experienced, even a past that never existed. Tolkien would be the obvious example to cite here, but maybe too obvious, so consider Star Wars instead. It is not an accident that Star Wars takes place “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away” as opposed to in our future. The setting of the film is quite obviously entirely imaginary and does not even pretend to be part of an actual past—but it aims to access the audience’s feelings about a lost set of virtues and powers (that’s an explicit theme of the film as well), so the film asserts that it is set in the past in order to plug into those feelings of nostalgia. The point being: the key emotional qualities of the nostalgic stance have nothing to do with actual memory. It’s the stance itself that generates the emotion.

Even when the past being longed for did exist, as often as not—more often, I suspect—the same dynamic plays out: the people longing for that past are people who were born long after it had faded into history. Moonlight-and-magnolia nostalgia for the antebellum South surged as Confederate veterans died off. Mid-century America was the heyday for the Western, but the frontier had “closed” in the late 19th century; the enthusiasm for the genre reflected contemporary anxieties, not memory. Our post-Cold War nostalgia for World War II—central to Bob Dole’s acceptance speech in 1996 which Douthat quotes nostalgically—was wildly at odds with how people who were actually around then (including Dole himself) experienced it.

There’s something both comical and tragic about orienting yourself around this kind of second-hand nostalgia. As I put it in a long-ago review of a collection of essays by Irving Kristol:

Making first-hand nostalgia a basis for one’s understanding of the world is perhaps tragic. But finding that basis in second-hand nostalgia is farcical. My father can go around saying he’s still voting for Scoop Jackson—and he does—and that just tells us what was his formative political experience. But if I go through high school carrying a copy of Homage to Catalonia and lamenting that I’m too young to fight for Spain—which I did—I’m just behaving like a character in a Wes Anderson movie.

That’s precisely what it feels to me like much of the posturing on the political right consists of: a kind of sterile cosplaying. I think it bears as much relationship to any meaningful politics as wearing white pants suits does for mainstream liberals or putting hammer-and-sickle icons in your bio does for leftists, that is to say: none. It’s all empty posturing. It’s not an effort to learn anything from the past, and none of it points to any kind of future.

But does futurism point to a future? Not, I think, without some connection to the past—which both Yglesias’s and Douthat’s visions actually have. Yglesias is dynamist, someone who prizes energy and growth for their own sakes, and Douthat is too in his way, but their visions of the future are inherently infected by an attitude toward the past, indeed, toward the history of the future. Douthat’s lodestar these days is decadence and the need to break out of it, but he (correctly) sees that renewal means not rejecting the past but reconnecting with it—precisely what happened in the Renaissance with which early modernity began. But Yglesias’s vision of the future is also rooted in a sense of possibility from the past. Yglesias wants there to be one billion Americans and to turn Marin County into Star Trek’s version thereof—in other words, he’s nostalgic for an earlier generation’s vision of the future (that is to say, a 1990s version of a 1960s version of it).

When Yglesias pounds the table about nuclear power or cross-racial class-based political alliances or buying Greenland or any of his various other personal obsessions, he frequently references the past, not in a nostalgic way but in a connective way. He’s not saying “we used to be a country” (other than facetiously) but rather “doing this is totally normal for us; we’ve done stuff like it plenty of times before, with good results.” He not trying to go back; he’s trying to go forward along at least somewhat proven paths—not necessarily the paths we’re currently on, but ones we’ve traveled forward on in the past. That’s a key reason to have a usable past: when you access it, it makes doing a new thing seem less risky, and more doable. Which means you’re more likely to do it.

Without that element of connection to and building on the past, futurism comes to be dominated by a a kind of loathing for the present and the actual lives we are leading. This is the same emotion that animates and is animated by nostalgia—both are ways of fleeing life rather than exploring it. The preservationist and the iconoclast are, in many ways, mirror images of each other. A big motivation for preservationism’s stultifying dead hand is the simple belief that we are incapable of creating anything as beautiful as people made in the past. But the iconoclast’s envious hammer is impelled by a very similar spirit, because if the old icons had no inherent power, if they could be shamed into obsolescence, then they would not need smashing. Neither orientation enables us to make use of the past. The same is true of our social reactionaries and revolutionaries; to my ears, they both sound like people determined not to live life, but who are instead determined to demonstrate the impossibility of living. Should we go “back” to a world of fixed gender roles, where women were women and men were men and nobody could possibly confuse them, or “forward” to a world where an infinitely proliferating panoply of genders are a matter of pure personal expression? Both sound awful to me, but a big reason why they sound awful is that they both feel rooted in a loathing for actual being, and actual connection, in preference for the clean and tidy fatality of the absolute.

I’m re-reading Paul Johnson’s history of art now, and one striking thing to me about the story of the Renaissance and Baroque periods—what for us is foundational art, the era of the Old Masters—is that there was no division between looking back and looking forward. Michelangelo and Raphael weren’t trying to go “back” to Greece and Rome; they were trying to go forward, learning from them in order to make new things that the ancients would never have dreamt of or even necessarily understood. Caravaggio’s realism was revolutionary but was also central to Counter-Reformation Catholicism’s effort to reconnect with Christianity’s origins, in a manner completely opposed to Protestantism’s own revolutionary return. The same is true of the men who wrote the American constitution—they weren’t trying to recreate the Roman republic, but to learn from it, and from other historic republican examples, not because they knew everything but to build on what they knew.

To do that, you have to actually know things. You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, anymore than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past, its glories and its follies alike, its conflicts and its contradictions. If we want to be like our forebears who successfully made it new, we have to, you know, be like them. We have to mine the incredibly rich resource of our past, and use that resource in whatever way we need to create new forms of art and politics, forms that are relevant to us. And then we have to hope that the future will treat us the same way, because then it will be alive.